Online web photo albums have attained a significant degree of popularity both through personal websites, online photo-sharing sites, and peer-to-peer photo-sharing networks. Typically, a user uploads or downloads digital images and albums to his or her personal website, photo-sharing site, or personal computer, which also store other resources, such as user sites, electronic greeting cards, electronic books, movies, music, etc. (collectively referred to as “resources”). Typically, the resources are presented in either a disjoint state or the relationships presented between the resources are static. For example, if a user wished to browse photo albums that contain pictures taken on a given date, the user could not follow a set of links from one album to another that meets this criteria. In other words, there is no “web” of albums containing pictures taken on a specified date.
A user who is interested in accessing a resource at a site, e.g., viewing an image, or an album containing images, typically clicks on the link to the resource, which opens the resource. Some sites provide links to a fixed subset of related resources. This subset of related resources often is not the subset the resource owner wishes to make available and might not be the subset that a visitor is interested in locating. If the user is interested in accessing resources related to an opened resource beyond the subset provided, but does not know if such related resources exist and/or does not know the respective links if they do exist, the user is required to perform a site search. If such a function is supported by the site, the user must enter various search criteria to the site, which then retrieves a list of resources and their links that satisfy the search criteria.
Crafting an appropriate search criteria in order to retrieve relevant information is a difficult task and depends on the user's skills and on the site's search engine. For example, if the search criteria is too broad, the search engine will return data that, while satisfying the query, is irrelevant to the user's needs. To address this, certain search engines provide the user with a variety of fixed search criteria from which the user may select. For example, in a conventional social networking website, the user is interested in retrieving information about other people with similar interests. These services allow a user to traverse a fixed subset of relationships which exists among the users of the service. For example, a user can traverse from one user page to find the pages of other users that are related by gender, marital status, or some other supported criteria. The criteria available are not under the control of the owner of the page or the viewer of the page.
While the burden of formulating a query is lifted from the user, the ability for the user to craft a query closely reflecting his or her interests is greatly limited because the search engine only provides limited search criteria. In the above example, the user would not be allowed to specify a preference for individuals who share an interest in football or orchids for example.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that allows a user to specify relationships between and among resources stored at a site. Moreover, the system and method should automatically provide links to and between related resources such that the user can easily navigate to such related resources. The present invention addresses such a need.